Storm blamed in forest death

Thursday

Oct 28, 2010 at 12:01 AM

She did her best to stay warm in nasty, winterlike weather, despite being dressed more for a pleasant fall day to pick mushrooms in the woods southeast of Lowell on Saturday.

“There were a couple of pieces of bark kind of propped haphazardly” in an apparent makeshift shelter, Lane County Search and Rescue Coordinator John Miller said Wednesday, of the area where searchers found Dodie Throssel’s body on Tuesday.

“There was a hole in the dirt where she tried to make a fire,” Miller added. But there were no ashes, no evidence that she ever got anything to burn with her cigarette lighter.

All indications thus far are that the 54-year-old Springfield woman died of hypothermia caused by exposure to the driving rains, high winds and snow that hit Lane County Sunday and Monday. Hypothermia occurs when the body loses heat faster than it can produce it, causing dangerously low body temperatures below 95 degrees. It leads to shivering and mental confusion, heart and respiratory failure and, finally, death.

An autopsy performed Wednesday ruled out any sort of death from injury, Lane County Chief Deputy Medical Examiner Frank Ratti said. The final results will not be known until toxicology reports come back in a couple of weeks, Ratti said.

Throssel drove up Goodman Creek Road, south from Highway 58, with a couple of friends Saturday to pick chanterelle mushrooms. For some reason, she left the friends and drove a couple of miles farther by herself, parking about nine miles up the road from Highway 58. Her friends found her van but could find no sign of Throssel and called 911 after dark.

Search and rescue crews began looking Saturday night, with crews from Linn and Benton counties joining volunteers from Lane County on Monday.

About 40 searchers were looking for her when a group of Explorer Scouts from Linn County heard Throssel’s two Chow mix dogs barking Tuesday afternoon. Searchers followed the sound and found Throssel’s body about 5 p.m. It was about 2,000 feet east of where she parked her car — in a steep drainage deep in the woods.

“It took us eight hours to get her out of there,” Miller said. There were a few mushrooms in the area, but Throssel’s sons, Shane Throssel of Eugene and Micah Throssel of Arizona, told authorities their mother never would have gone down into such a treacherous area to pick mushrooms.

“So she was probably lost and disoriented, trying to find her way out,” Miller said.

Although searchers were able to locate Throssel’s body by following the barking of her dogs, they were not able to get the dogs to come to them, Miller said. As a result, Throssel’s sons returned to the area on Wednesday to try to find and retrieve the dogs, Miller said. It was not immediately known whether they were successful.

To test whether Throssel might have been able to hear searchers between Saturday night and Tuesday, a police car siren was activated by her parked van Tuesday night while rescue personnel stood near the body, Miller said. They heard nothing, he said. And that was under calm weather conditions.

“So you know, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, with the rain and wind, she probably didn’t hear anything,” Miller said.

Susie Throssel of Florence, the sister of Dodie Throssel’s ex-husband, Charles Throssel of Eugene, e-mailed a retrospective of Dodie Throssel’s life on Wednesday. She said Dodie Throssel was born in Los Angeles and met Charles Throssel there. They moved to Oregon not long after their first child, Micah, now 32, was born.

“Dodie was sharp-minded, quick-witted and well-known for her bubbly personality and famous laugh,” Susie Throssel wrote. She “loved being out in the woods — camping, mushroom picking, trekking with her doggies — taking in all the wonders of nature. Dodie never felt alone in the woods, rather she felt she was surrounded by Mother Nature, felt ‘nested in’ with so many of the earths’s gifts.

“No matter what occurred during her final hours, being out in ‘her woods,’ I like to think she was in the spot that she most loved on earth, surrounded by her beloved dogs, content knowing the deep love of family and friends that she carried in her heart — feeling at peace.”

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